Neo users explain why they've held on to the project despite China's heavy crypto crackdown

It's been a wild ride for Neo (dubbed by some as "Ethereum of China") investors in the past few years, especially as China began to incrementally introduce harsher crypto regulations. But despite the odds, the community appears to be resilient, with a dedicated society of developers worldwide and a bourgeoning decentralized finance, or DeFi, hub that came into prominence via the launch of Neo N3 mainnet last year. 

As told by Neo investors Lucas and Jiří, who spoke to Cointelegraph, they were not expecting such a "huge drop in price" for Neo. Still, they nevertheless decided to hold their Neo tokens through all the price turmoil, citing the project developers' dedication to its underlying technology. Lucas said:

"I know a bunch of Neo developer communities that are located across the world. They're not going to stop the project just because one country doesn't agree with their vision."

When asked about what made Neo's DeFi applications particularly attractive, compared to other alternatives, Jiří said:

"For Flamingo Finance, you could follow any steps on the roadmap they are preparing and what will be going next. They always kept the deadlines, or there was some reasonable justification for a delay. So I really like the transparency of the process of how the platform was evolving."

Flamingo Finance is a platform for converting crypto, earning yields, and providing liquidity. The project migrated to Neo N3 in Q4 of 2021. According to DeFi Llama, Flamingo Finance has approximately $80 million in total value locked. Lucas, who is also a user of Flamingo Finance, added: 

"They really focused on their on their user base. A while ago, they released a feature where you could claim different DeFi pools. I asked the team for a "claim all" button so that I don't have to spend time clicking the different pools to claim rewards. Within a few days, that feature was implemented."

On Monday, Neo also announced a partnership with E.U. social economy network Diesis, which has a support network of 90,000 organizations, and 1.2 million workers across 21 countries. Through the deal, Neo will help the latter develop blockchain solutions using Neo N3 ecosystem's decentralized file storage, NeoID. Luca Pastorelli, President of Diesis Network, commented:

"Neo pioneered the dBFT [delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance] consensus mechanism, so there is no mining on Neo. And N3 being an all-in-one development experience makes it the ideal blockchain partner for a global social and solidarity economy network."